IPCC Draft leaked

There are three figures that leap out at the reader. The first two show forecast warming relative to actual warming for all previous IPCC Reports and the third shows forecast CO2 and actual CO2 emissions.

Professor Matt England from the University of New South Wales says the findings send a message to doubters.

“Anybody out there lying that the IPCC projects are overstatements or that the observations haven’t kept pace with the projections is completely off line with this … the analysis is very clear that the IPCC projections are coming true,” he said.

The analysis is very clear that the IPCC projections are coming true.

“We’ve sat back and watched the two decades unfold and warming has progressed at a rate consistent with those projections.”

Recent climate change reports have shown global emissions are increasing by 3 per cent per year, with emissions now sitting at 58 per cent above 1990 levels.

IPCC projections of what? CO2 emissions? Okay – what what has happened to the global temperature? Looks like it has been flat-lining and not growing as predicted.

Update: Aynsley Kellow points out that the third grapgh actually shows atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and not CO2 emissions.

A very temporary pause. These changes don’t go in straight lines. When warming resumes it will likely take off with a burst sufficient to restore and even show an accelerating trend over the last 30 years.

It will be worth waiting to see the egg all over the faces of the denialists. Of course they’ll then predictably come up with some other denialist narrative.

SMH report by Ben Cubby. Is the Ben Cubby-house green? Or is green housing only for the poor?
Now if we could only calm the sun down a bit and cool the earth more. Or is the sun calming already?
With solar cycle 24 reaching a possible maximum.

Bummer! I was going to post that but had to run out of the house to pick up a son and his friend for breakfast, then the site appeared to be down. Harking back to the work that Matt Ridley did on previous reports, all the good news is kept out of sight. Lets welcome warming indicates that there is more good than bad in warming (not that it is warming at all, pity about that).

Fresh water: The bottom-line – allowing for some variability around the globe, “all other things being equal, warming will itself reduce the total population at risk from water shortage.”

Storms: The trends are positive, especially on the indicator of the anticipated human death toll. He noted a massive reduction in the death toll from weather-related natural disasters since the 1920s – from 242 per million people to 3 per million in the 2000s. The main factor here is better storm/flood prevention, which is a factor of economic growth. However there is no reason to expect that the weather will change to increase the frequency or severity of storms.

Health: Cold is a bigger killer than heat by a factor of five. There is no reason to expect malaria to become a bigger problem with warming. Other claims linking deaths and disease to climate change have been disproved on further investigation.

Food: Quite simply, mild warming plus more CO2 means more productive farming, more food from the same area. After all, CO2 is an essential plant food, and the carbon tax could just as well be called a “plant food tax” to underline the unreality of the situation.

Collateral benefits: More productive agriculture means that less undeveloped land is required to support human needs for food and fibre. That will pay off in terms of protecting species and maintaining biodiversity.

When you think about it they really picked the wrong horse with ‘climate justice’ when they were looking for something to extend the reaches of ‘social justice’. We get a fairer and more equitable society with AGW. Perhaps we should try and make it really happen.

Salby’s work goes to the last and only basis for AGW; which is whether human emissions of CO2, ACO2, are the primary or only cause for the increase in atmospheric concentrations of CO2, or whether natural emissions are.

The issue is complex because there is a bulk and flux component.

The bulk component, the change in the atmospheric CO2 concentration, was looked at in Knoor’s paper.

Knoor found the airborne fraction of ACO2 has not changed in 150 years. That must mean that non-ACO2 emissions are contributing to the increase in the bulk CO2 concentration.

The reason for this is the principle of a constant in an increasing total: say ACO2 is 20% of CO2 which is 100, so ACO2 is 20; when CO2 is 200 ACO2′s 20% will be 40 so other CO2 has contributed 60; at 300, ACO2 is 60, other is 140 and so on; natural CO2 must be contributing to the increase in total CO2.

This shows that of the annual CO2 flux, ACO2 is 8Gt out of the total of 218.2Gt or 3.67%. US Department of Energy [DOE] figures put this % at 2.91% but for argument’s sake it does not matter.

DOE shows that approximately 98.5% of the total flux is reabsorbed in sinks, predominantly natural although cropping would add a miniscule amount.

If one assumes that the same proportion of ACO2 of the total flux is NOT reabsorbed but adds to the bulk atmospheric concentration the simple formula of how much ACO2 adds to the atmospheric increase would be annually:

3.67/100 X 1.5/100 = 0.000552

That is one ACO2 has a 1 in 1811.594203 of still being in the atmosphere after 1 year.

After 2 years the probability would be 1 in 120772.9469 chance of remaining.

Clearly on this basis ACO2 would not be contributing to the increase in CO2.

But this is what caught Alan Jones out; it does so because it confuses the residence time of a molecule of ACO2 and the time required for the atmosphere to adjust to the ACO2 emissions adding to the atmospheric bulk.

Cawley asserts that the “one-box model of the carbon cycle used in ES09 [Essenhigh] directly gives rise to (i) a short residence time of ~4 years, (ii) a long adjustment time of ~74 years”.

Effectively, this means that while one ACO2 molecule does not remain long the effect of all the ACO2 on the atmospheric bulk is long-lasting and therefore supports the idea that ACO2 is the main reason for the increase in CO2.

However, Essenhigh uses a “one box” model in which flux from the atmosphere has a linear relationship with the concentration [bulk] of CO2. Essenhigh expresses this as:

F=k*C, where F is the flux from the atmosphere to the environment, C is the atmospheric concentration, and k is a proportionality constant.

Cawley changes this to F=k*C +F0, where F0 is a constant flux independent of atmospheric concentration.

This assumption by Cawley contradicts Henrys Law and would mean that when there is zero CO2 in the atmospher (C=0) there would still be a finite flux (f0) of CO2 from the atmosphere!

Essenhigh’s model is to be preferred and means that Knoor’s bulk analysis is correct; that is most if not all the increase in CO2 is not coming from ACO2.

Even if there were not considerable evidence that AGW science is wrong, if it is the case that the increase in CO2 is not due to ACO2 then humans are not causing AGW.

It could be the case that I am not reading these temperature graphs correctly, but it seems to me, contrary to Professor Davidson, that the trend is upward. Given the obvious increase increase in concentrations of Carbon Dioxide (and other GHG’s), if the theory is correct the implication is that there inertia in the system, and so the concern would be that the potential change is significantly greater than experienced to date.

Looking at that first graph, the model that includes the yellow area at the top, and its range, is both hopelessly vague and hopelessly inaccurate. Any consultant in the private sector that produced something as useless as that would be lucky to get paid.

Perhaps the UN (yes, I know, I’m dreaming) could set up some sort of competitive environment whereby the model which produces the worst, vaguest, most unrealistic forecasts each year is automatically de-funded, and the rest are left to fight it out, knowing that next year’s loser will also get the chop. In that way, reality might be allowed to intrude into what is, from the evidence of the IPCC’s own graphs, a gigantic w$%k.

The most unsurprising result here is that reading a graph is beyond the capability of most. Many here seem to think they can draw other conclusions from the pretty pictures, but they’re not suitably equipped. Go back to your meals; the economy loves a consumer.

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Liberty Quotes

Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.— Ayn Rand